How Vin Diesel Punk’d His Way Into the Marvel Universe

It was the headline that sent the fanboy world abuzz: Vin Diesel has mysterious meetings with Marvel to discuss an upcoming movie. The word was leaked by Diesel himself on his popular Facebook page, but with precious few details. At the time, all we could do was wildly speculate. Was it Vision? Luke Cage? Thanos?! It turns out it was nothing. Vin Diesel never had a meeting with Marvel; he was just f---ing around on social media, trying to get a rise out of comic book fans.

And, it worked! To stir the pot even further, Diesel quickly deleted the original Facebook post, further fueling the speculation. Over 206,000 people "liked" the post on Facebook, but behind-the-scenes there was actually nothing to report. No meetings, talks, discussions or negotiations of any kind had actually transpired between Diesel and Marvel and none were planned.

But, then a funny thing happened. The buzz was so intense, Marvel couldn't help but notice. According to Bleeding Cool, they then reached out to Diesel's rep with a brief hello and a quick laugh over it and, not shortly thereafter, an actual meeting was had between the two sides. Out of that came the news that Diesel would voice and provide the motion-capture for Groot, the walking tree in Marvel's 'Guardians of the Galaxy.'

Diesel has since teased additional updates, saying he is still talking with Marvel about a film in Phase 3 that wouldn't be released for a few years. How much of that is legitimate and how much of that is Vin continuing to have fun stoking the fanboy flames remains to be seen.

It's all a little peek behind the curtain of how these deals get made sometimes. You hear something, it gets debunked, but later it actually winds up happening and this is a good example of how that all plays out behind-the-scenes. All because Vin Diesel likes messing with his 66 million Facebook fans.